r
bort becker
Freudian Allen heals
in Everything . . Sex
Review by Roy Baldwin
Woody Allen is a genius and a master of practical
psychology. In Everything You Aways Wanted to Know
About Sex he does befuddled, sexually-uptight America a
great healing service.
It's enough to go to the movie, which you should, and
laugh, which you will.
Allen can always be appreciated on the slapstick level. But
this, the latest of his works, has a moral that we ignore at our
psychic peril.
Allen's recent movies are conspicuous for their use of a
super-ego, Freud's god-like part of the psyche. In Play It
Again, Sam the ghost of Humphrey Bogart returns to advise a
befuddled, sexually uptight movie fanatic Allen himself. In
Everything You Always... Woody gets to play both
super-ego and fool.
Everything You Always... is classic satire. From the
opening credits, unreeled before a herd of rabbits, we get the
message-Veryr??0 You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
was a dull, pretentious book that told us a lot of things we
didn't need to know.
The title of each vignette (there are seven), questions some
aspect of sex like, 'What is sodomy?" Each scene ends by
telling us, "Don't ask!"
It's obvious how much Woody enjoys all this. He did the
screenplay and the directing. Everyone else-Tony Randall,
Burt Reynolds, Lynn Redgrave-get roles that only Woody
could bring off. Not being Woody, they usually fail. But no
matter Woody is great.
He dances across the screen acting out our sexual fantasies,
showing us how ridiculous we've been all this time. He is a
wisecracking jester in a medieval court who tempts the queen
with an aphrodisiac, ("Cheers," she says. "And Roebuck," he
answers.) but gets his hand caught in her chastity belt.
Woody also is one of a suicide squad of brainwashed
sperm-troopers in the ultimate schizophrenic fantasy of our
age-a guy named Sidney run by little technicians straight
from A Pepto-Bismol ad who treat the conquest of a young
NYU graduate the way Houston treats a moonshot.
Woody is Victor Shakapopoulis, courageous young sex
researcher who rescues civilization from a gigantic,
disembodied breast ("about a 4,000 with an X cup"),
brainchild of a Karloffesque retiree from Masters and Johnson
beautifully played by John Carradine.
His work done, Victor reveals himself as the true super-ego
of us all and intones the moral of the film -"When it comes to
sex, there are certain things that should be unknown, and with
my luck they will be."
Through it all, Allen is brilliant. Not always in the best of
taste, not always hitting his mark squarely, but always the fool
vho knows he's going to get the last laugh. ,
thlS
IfJOOEt
Tuesday
3 7, 9 p.m. Sheldon-Special F Urns,
Maidstone by Norman Mailer,
8 p.m. Kimball Recital
Hall Faculty recital, Arnold
Schat, violinist, and Audun
Havnan. pianist.
Friday
7 , 10 p.m. Nebraska
Union-Weekend Film, Who if
Harry Kelltrman. Alto, Buck
Roger t serial.
8 p.m. Pershing Cheech and Cheng
concert.
Saturday
7, 10 p.m. Union-Weekend Film,
Who If Harry Kellerman.
Sunday
7 p.m. East Union-Weekend Film,
Who If Harry Kellerman.
Art Galleries
Sheldon-1 2th and R. Richard
Trickey paintings and Roger
Williams photographs to Sept. 24,
Thomas Coleman prints to Oct. 1.
The sculpture garden it always
open.
Haymarket-1 19 S. 9th. Silk
screens by Rick Otoupalik and
sculptures by Brian Quinn to Sept.
23.
Firtt Federal-1235 N. JoAnn
A If ray to Sept. 29. Chauncey
Nelton betikt to Sept. 22.
Unitarian Church-6300 A.
Paintings and ceramics by Joy
DeKlotz to Sept. 17.
Cultural wasteland produces
If you find yourself with a few hours on
your hands one of these lonely Nebraska nights
you might try following some age-old advice
and curl up with a good book.
And if you don't think you own a book
worthy of curling up with, you ought to take a
careful look around you. 'Cause right here in
the old cultural wasteland, Lincoln, Neb., there
is good literature being produced.
Several local poets are beginning to build up
solid reputations in poetry circles. UNL English
instructor Greg Kuzma's Song For Someone
Going Away and Harry's Things are both
collections worth reading. Kuzma also has a
couple of volumes to be released sometime this
spring.
In addition to his own writings, he is
responsible for Pebble magazine. Issues to date
have contained high-quality work by reputable
poets and critics as well as providing less known
poets with a showcase for their work.
Pebble is printed on Kuzma's Best Cellar
Press on fine stock and the printing work is of
craftsman's quality.
Also emitting from the Best Cellar Press is
the Best Cellar series of pamphlets. The
pamphlet series has highlighted poets as
accomplished as Richard Shelton and Duane
Ackerson as well as relative newcomers Barry
McDonald and Mordecai Marcus..
McDonald, a former UNL student, was
presented in 'The Pink House," a collection of
poems. McDonald also edited Country
Bumpkin, an undergraduate poetry collection,
last year.
Marcus, whose poems are beginning to
appear in many poetry magazines, has a fine
collection called "Five Minutes to Noon." The
UNL instructor formerly worked mostly in
literary criticism.
Kuzma's books are generally available at
campus bookstores and Blue Sky Books. If they
can't be found there, they are all available, as
are copies of Pebble and the Best Cellar Press
series, in his Andrews Hall office.
In addition to all this, Prairie Schooner is
produced in the UNL English Dept. Bern ice
Slote edits this fine quarterly of poetry, fiction
and criticism. It solicits material from a wide
range of people and places and is always
pleasant reading.
Aaltillo is another locally produced
quarterly of poetry. William Kloefkorn is the
new editor and the poetry presented is gathered
both locally and statewide.
Lincoln poet Ted Kooser has 2t least two
books, "Grass County" and "Official Entry
Blank" to his credit. The former includes
illustration by the author and poems about
Nebraskans.
Roy Shields' Three Sheets series is also
produced locally although most of the poets
featured call somewhere else home.
Certainly none of what I've written is
intended as a critical evaluation of the literature
being produced locally, although I think most
of it is high quality. It is intended only to
create an awareness that such literature is
available for the poetry enthusiast.
Mailer film
There's not a whole lot of action going this
week. Tuesday's Special Film at Sheldon
Gallery is Norman Mailer's Maidstone
On the first day of shooting in the summer
of 1S&3, Mdiler told J. Anthony Lukas of the
New York Times that he hoped to "prove that
one can make a beautiful, tasteful, resonant,
touching, evocative picture with cinema verite
methods in four days . . It's going to be a film
about a notorious movie director Norman T.
Kingsley-who had come to the east end of
Long Island ostensibly to look for sites for his
new movie."
There was also to be the
movie-within-the-movie, and all sorts of
political crosscurrents, since Norman T.
Kingsley was being considered as a Presidential
candidate.
There was no script, and Mailer's friends and
associates, as well as a lot of amateur actors and
a few real ones (most notably Rip Torn,) were
put into situations over which the director
would have no control, at least until shooting
was completed.
In Maidstone, real people and actors were
asked to improvise fictional characters.
, At the end of seven days, the Maidstone
camera crews had something like 45 hours of
film, which, after almost two years of editing,
Mailer and his associates have whittled to a
mere 105 minutes.
Weekend entertainment
Friday night Cheech and Chong breeze into
Pershing for their laugh-a-minute show. They've
currently got both their albums, Cheech and
Chong and Big Bambu riding the charts. So
they ought to be good for a couple chuckles, if
not guffaws.
The weekend film Friday, Saturday and
Sunday is Who is Harry Kellerman with Dustin
Hoffman. It's at the Union small auditorium
Friday and Saturday nights and at the East
Campus Union Sunday.
Good reading
A Separate Reality; Further Conversations
with don Juan by Carlos Castaneda originally
published by Simon and Schuster and now
available in paperback from Pocket Books.
In 1961 Castaneda, then an anthropology
student, subjected himself to an apprenticeship
to don Juan, a 70-year-old Yaqui Indian known
to be a brujo "a medicine man, curer,
sorcerer." In The Teachings of Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Castaneda published
the account of his five-year apprenticeship.
In it he told of the uses of peyote, jimson
weed and other hallucinogenic plants in
opening the doors of perception to a world of
"non-ordinary reality" completely beyond the
concepts of Western civilization. At the end of
that book he told how, in fear and exhaustion,
he had stopped his search.
In 1968 Castaneda returned to Mexico, to
don Juan, and to the hallucinogenic drugs and
experiences never before opened to a man from
our Western civilization.
Attempting to become "a man of
knowledge," Castaneda recounts how he
learned to see beyond the surface realities of
life, partly with the aid of drugs but essentially
through a difficult and demanding effort of
intelligence and will.
Castaneda is describing a shamanistic
tradition that has never before been
experienced by Western man and has reported
it in such a manner as to give other Westerners
some insight into the gift don Juan has to
offer wisdom.
"A man of knowledge is free ... he has no
honor, no dignity, no family, no home, no
country, but only life to be lived."
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page 6
daily nebraskan
monday, September 18, 1972
